


a hundred thousand bodies (and one we could have saved)

by ammunitionist



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Body Worship, Comfort Sex, Cunnilingus, Infidelity, M/M, Trans Hawkeye, Trans Male Character, but not really, peg is cool with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:41:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24046825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ammunitionist/pseuds/ammunitionist
Summary: sometimes, hawkeye loses track.bj makes it easier to get by.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42





	a hundred thousand bodies (and one we could have saved)

**Author's Note:**

> hey yall! i wrote this fic for my boyfriend because he loves mash and trans hawkeye is something we (both trans men) like a lot. i hope you like it too. enjoy!

If Hawkeye could jar the look on Frank’s face and keep it on a shelf, he’d burn the Bible to make room. 

The competition was simple enough: at the end of the week, Colonel Potter would award the ‘best performing’ officer and serviceman with a 3-day pass to Tokyo each. Passes had become scarce in recent weeks, with a seemingly endless barrage of wounded soldiers storming the 4077th. Day and night were distinguishable only by how much extra light was coming in through the windows.

Once a shell finally burst close enough for them to blow in, the corpsman covered them with blankets and it became entirely impossible to tell what time it was. The generator never blew, so it didn’t matter much anyway. The lights stayed on and the bodies kept coming.

By Saturday, Hawkeye was something he found himself to be very rarely: exhausted. More specifically, too exhausted to bother interacting with Frank’s compulsory ass-kissing. He probably didn’t even want the pass; just some weird bootlicker instinct to please his commanding officers. The second that Major Burns heard the words ‘competition’ and ‘best’ in the same sentence, he dropped to his knees and took the entire front half of Potter’s boot into his mouth. 

The image was revolting. Hawk stopped thinking about it seconds after he started. 

So, when Potter gathers them all in the mess tent around 1800, Frank looks rather like a puppy begging around a dinner table. If the man stood any straighter, they could turn him upside down and use him for a mop. 

“His upper lip could hold the soap,” BJ muses next to him, and Hawkeye snorts.

“Did I say that out loud?” 

“Yeah.” BJ looks concerned for just a split second, glancing down at his compatriot. “You good, Hawk?”

“Peachy. Now hush, I wanna hear the valedictorian speech.” BJ elbows him as Potter wearily takes the podium, heralded by enthusiastic applause on Frank’s part, and a few lackluster claps from the corpsmen. 

“It’s been a long week, boys… and Major Houlihan.” Potter sighs, to a chorus of nods and a faintly miffed-then-satiated expression out of Hot Lips. “You all did your jobs admirably. It’s times like these that make me proud to be your CO.” 

“Aw, thanks, Dad,” Hawkeye replies immediately, to a couple of laughs. Potter just glances at him and sighs.

“I’m very grateful to Major Burns for organizing this competition, because I think there are some of you who very much deserve this pass. I’ll start with the corpsman.” 

Potter unravels a piece of thin paper from an envelope on the podium and clears his throat, to the tone of sudden silence in the room.

“Corporal Radar O’Reilly.”

Hawkeye even claps for that one. Radar, in his perpetually capable resourcefulness, had kept them gloved and stocked through the weeklong barrage. He’d pulled an entire case of plasma seemingly out of his ass on Thursday, when Hawkeye was on the verge of going around, sticking people with needles, and shaking them violently until the IV ran clear. 

Nudging through the crowd, Radar squirrels his way up to the platform, pink from the accolade. He waves awkwardly as the applause dies down and Potter hands him the pass, patting him on the shoulder.

“Good job, son.”

“Thank you, sir.” Radar replies timidly, looking rather like a frightened groundhog.

“You can sit down now, Radar.”

“Right. Sorry sir.”

Potter clears his throat as Radar squirrels right back to his seat, nudging in between Klinger and a disgruntled private. Hawk gives him a brief, albeit tired smile. The kid earned it.

“And now for officers.” Potter says gruffly, and Frank’s back straightens even further as he smiles expectantly, clearly looking forward to the opportunity to decline the pass “In the favor of duty, sir.” 

Hawk looks, exhausted, to BJ, who seemed to have been expecting something more than a bone-tired glance. His frown just deepens in response.

“Hawkeye Pierce.”

* * *

The pass doesn’t last, of course.

The thought was nice, and the look on Frank’s face was delicious, but Hawkeye isn’t half packed before the loudspeaker is ringing out orders for all hands on deck. Radar tells him breathlessly that it’s a whole ‘nother wave of wounded, sir, there was a push on but they didn’t tell us. He apologizes in the same breath, but Hawk doesn’t hear any of it. 

Too busy scrubbing up to dig around in some poor boy’s guts. 

It’s eighteen hours of work.

Or twenty.

Fifteen?

It doesn’t matter. 

He’s stitching together some teenager’s bowel one minute, plucking shrapnel from someone’s calf another. For all he can process, it’s the same person. The same torn, mangled body, face younger every time he turns back around. There’s not a single part of the form that seems sacred, and the blood it spits onto his scrubs and hands and chest is all the same. 

It’s sometime early dusk when it finally happens. He waves a boy off to get closed up and calls for another body, another kid, another half-job. He wouldn’t be proud of a single one of these surgeries in civilian life, but here, it’s enough for them to re-enlist and that’s enough for him.

“There’s no more, sir.”

“Sorry? I said bring me another kid, Garcia.”

“I heard you, Captain, but there aren’t any more.”

Hawk looks the nurse up and down incredulously. She looks just as tired as he probably does, and there’s blood on a slim corner of her mask where someone probably missed. 

“You’re done, sir. You can go wash up.”

The words sound like gibberish. The idea of being _finished_ left his mind months ago. It was just on and then off.

This is off, he supposes.

When he finally gets out of the bloodied scrubs and mostly washed up, the sun is long since gone and the camp is quiet. They fall back into silence for a while after big pushes like this. There isn’t a soul in the place that can’t do with a little quiet after the storm.

“Hey, Hawkeye.” BJ looks up from a letter,

“What?” 

“You look like the wrong end of a long horse.”

“Gee, Beej. Tell it to me straight, huh?” Hawk replies tiredly, barely making it three steps into the Swamp before collapsing on his cot. It isn’t soft, but god _damn,_ is it horizontal.

“Sweet of them to put this thing here,” he groans, feeling an uncomfortable lump of sheet dig into his lower abdomen. “If I took another step you’d have to drag me back to the OR.”

“You’re almost tall enough it’d amount to a concussion.” BJ muses. Hawkeye just groans in response. The pillow is soft enough in his cheek that he can almost ignore the creeping doubt coming up in the corners of his mind.

“Hey, Beej?” 

“Yeah?” BJ replies, in the abrupt, shortcoming way he does sometimes. It’s familiar, and it almost eases up the growing instability in Hawkeye’s chest.

“How long were we in there that time?” 

His eyes are still shut, but he hears the faint rustle of paper as BJ sets down the letter he’s reading.

“Hawk, are you serious?”

“Just tell me.”

“Twenty hours, give or take a pneumothorax.”

Hawk grunts into the pillow. It sounds more like an apology than an acknowledgement.

“Hawk?”

“What?” Hawkeye replies again, irritation a budding sting under his solar plexus.

“You don’t sound too good.”

“Yeah, I think it’s the- the twenty hours digging around in kids that still have baby teeth.”

The silence that follows leaves a sour taste in his mouth.

The light is faint through his eyelids, but it still shifts when BJ gets up off his cot and walks the whopping three feet between their bunks. Hawkeye moves to roll onto his side in a disgruntled response, expecting some kind of reprimand. 

Instead, BJ’s hand is so abruptly warm on his thigh that he visibly jumps. 

The air had turned cold a month or so ago, but not cold enough that they’d been ordered into their oh-so unflattering cold weather fatigues. They just suffered in the thin cotton and waited. Waited, in this case, for a pleasant heat to spread into Hawkeye’s upper leg from a hand that’s becoming more welcome by the second. 

“Beej-“

“You’re not crazy, Hawk.”

Hawkeye blinks blearily up at BJ, whose head looks rather silly haloed by their incandescent light. The pressure in his head is still building, an insistent buzz he can’t quite shake. 

“What are you talking about? ‘Course I’m not crazy. They wouldn’t give me my doctorate for years because I’m that not crazy.”

“That was med school, Hawkeye. And stop deflecting.”

Hawkeye just looks at him, indignant and almost proudly exhausted.

“I know what you’re thinking. Losing track doesn’t make you crazy, Hawk.”

“I-“ He sighs, feeling the bile-like flood of hurt rushing up his throat faster than he can stop it. God damn BJ and his irritatingly perceptive eye. 

“I’m not cut out for this, BJ. I can't keep digging around in kids and calling it surgery.”

“Call it whatever you want, you’re saving lives,” BJ replies mildly. It’s so mild that another surge of irritation stains Hawkeye’s tongue yellow.

“Not really, Beej. I mean- twenty fucking hours in surgery and what do we have to show for it? A bunch of soldiers that’ll be back in three weeks for something else anyway. It’s not fair.”

“All’s fair in love and war, right?” BJ rakes another vexingly warm hand through the back of Hawkeye’s hair, and the suddenness of it tenses the muscles in the back of his neck. 

“Only it’s not.” Hawkeye mumbles back, his forehead hitting against the joint between BJ’s chest and shoulder.

“It’s not, and it sucks.”

BJ just lets his head rest there, the hand on the back of Hawkeye’s head nearing blistering.

“How are you so damn warm?” Hawk murmurs, to a gentle, vibrating chuckle out of BJ. 

“I’ll be honest, I’m a little bit past buzzed.”

“Oh, me too, but that never makes me warm. Just lecherous.”

“I think I can handle that.”

The hand on his thigh shifts upward, and Hawkeye is too busy kissing BJ to do anything but spread them wider. He’s so fucking _hot_ it’s exasperating, both in regards to temperature and form. Hawk reaches suddenly for his fly, as is their custom, but BJ catches his hand by the wrist. 

“Let me take care of you for once, Hawk. It’ll do me some good anyway.” 

“Fine, but don’t tell my dad.” Hawkeye grunts, leaning back to let BJ at his belt. “He always said I’d end up a nagging wife.” 

Beej just raises an eyebrow and tugs open his fly, helping Hawkeye drag the fatigues down to his ankles. 

“What, not so happy to see me?”

“Not yet. Still recovering.”

“I can speed up that healing process for you, if you like.” 

Hawkeye tosses the fatigues in the general vicinity of Frank’s cot and scoots forward, watching BJ’s knees hit the deck with an eagerness Hawkeye has matched fondly in the past.

BJ’s breath is warm on his dick, warm like the goddamn rest of him. He’d never once been apprehensive of Hawkeye’s anatomy, not since the first time they’d slept together, and it was almost ingratiating to lean back and be worshiped. 

He leans in and runs his tongue up the length of him, pulling a shiver from the older man. Hawk never seemed older, not really, just some anachronistic figure with a fucking _excellent_ talent for cocksucking. 

The thought doesn’t make BJ any more aroused than he would have been otherwise, since the noise that Hawkeye makes when his teeth brush his dick is plenty to overwhelm the man’s feeble memory. His thighs tighten around BJ’s shoulders just slightly, a faintly choked moan slipping between his lips. After nearly a complete day elbows deep in blood, threading his fingers into BJ’s hair feels like heaven. Beej responds pleasantly, humming into Hawkeye’s cock and slipping his tongue just slightly inside of him. Hawk groans approval right back, feeling the warmth of blood rushing to his cheeks and dick alike. 

“You could market this as skilled labor, yknow.”

Beej sucks Hawkeye’s cock into his mouth swiftly, pulling an abrupt moan from the man’s lips.

“You pay me back in kind, Hawk. Stop quipping, I can’t suck cock with attitude.”

“Yessir, Cap’n Hunni- mmnfh.” Hawk groans, his hips canting slowly into BJ’s mouth. A heat is spreading into his thighs and up his chest, simultaneously a salve for the discomfort he walked out of the OR with and a fire heralding actual arousal within him.

Sometimes, when BJ- or others- offered fellatio, he accepted on manners and performative looseness. It always ended up feeling _nice_ , it was a blowjob after all, but it never quite ate into the rest of his body like this. He supposes it’s easier to sink back down into it when he’s truly fucking spent. They were always some kind of tired here, but there’s a tiredness that sinks deeper. The kind of tiredness that gets men sent to Tokyo General to never come out again. 

The kind of tiredness that blurs wounded boys into a twisted mass on an operating table. 

BJ’s tongue slips inside of him briefly, and Hawk tightens around it, biting his own tongue to keep quiet. it was a real shame he had to be quiet when they had sex in the Swamp- if Frank found them, Hawkeye could get in much more trouble than his preference in partners.

Almost as if sensing his worry, BJ’s broad, flat palm comes to rest on Hawkeye’s upper thigh, cutting the thoughts off when his fingers dig gently into the flesh there. 

“Beej-“ Hawk says breathlessly, hearing the man hum in acknowledgement. “Don’t-“

“Don’t what, Hawkeye?”

Hawk glances down at him with a fond irritability and pulls his face back down towards his cunt, insistent but not rude. BJ almost has to suppress a chuckle.

“Don’t _stop,_ BJ.”

He ducks back in between Hawkeye’s legs and feels satisfaction in the way he curses. 

Hawkeye’s dick had perked up since he’d started, soft and warm against BJ’s lips. He would almost call it cute, if Hawk’s anatomy wasn’t so goddamn _hot_ to him. He’d never met a man like Hawkeye before arriving in Korea, in more ways than sex, and it seemed more than likely he’d never meet anyone like Hawkeye again. 

BJ tugs him, again, into his mouth, sucking harder. His eyes train on Hawkeye’s face, the fucking _breathtaking_ way his lips fall open and he moans, low, asking. His chest is flushed slightly, redness creeping up towards his neck, and BJ feels himself stiffen at the way Hawk grabs at his own thigh, nails digging in parallel to BJ’s own. 

He’d been half hard for a bit now. Something about Hawkeye Pierce tugging his hair and moaning, exhausted, had his dick more interested than he’d ever been in the nurses. They were beautiful, but they weren’t _this._

Peg agrees, too, from the photos BJ sent home a few months ago.

Right as Hawk begins moaning steadily, BJ pulls off of his cunt, breathing elevated just slightly. Too hard to ignore it any longer, he just has to catch Hawk’s eye (ha) to get a breathless nod in response. 

“Do you want me to-“

“No, no, let me handle myself.” BJ shakes his head, pausing briefly to undo his own belt and pull his cock from the waistband. “All you have to do is look pretty.”

“Mm, challenge accepted.”

BJ’s tongue is heavy against his dick, laving across the sensitive flesh with something like hunger. A rumbling groan comes from deep from his throat as Beej finally handles himself, fisting his cock and sucking more forcefully at Hawkeye’s dick like air to the drowning. It tears a sharper moan from the older man, abdominal muscles flexing at the sensation. 

“Beejay-“ he gasps, his back arching off the bunched sheet. “Jesus Christ, Beej, ease up on my dick, will you?” 

“Sorry,” BJ rasps in response, a half-smile quirking the corner of his lips. “Got carried away.”

“You’re a doctor, Hunnicutt,” Hawk quips mildly, almost smiling again. “There’s very little room for error out here, you know.”

“I’m well aware, Dr. Pierce. It won’t happen again.” BJ replies tiredly, albeit smiling. 

“They should rescind your license.”

“Oh, if only.”

BJ’s lips return to his cunt, shiny with a combination of spit and Hawk’s own slick. His hips jerk when the warmth returns, the younger man sucking still insistently, but with force lessened just enough that it’s not too much. Hawkeye groans in approval, threading his fingers back into BJ’s hair and making his cock twitch in his fist. 

It’s enough that this is safe. 

It’s enough that he can touch BJ and not be looking for injuries, not be holding a scalpel or a needle, not having to brace for the stink of blood that never bothered him anymore anyway. It’s enough to pretend that they don’t have to go back outside and still be in Korea. 

BJ’s lips tighten on Hawkeye’s dick abruptly, reminding him of the budding tightness in his stomach. It was never hard for him to cum under duress. Hawkeye had honestly contemplated putting it on a resumé or two after the war. 

“ _Fuck-_ close,” he manages, chest heaving with each taxing breath. “Beejay, I’m-“ 

BJ nods briefly, forcing Hawkeye’s thighs further apart insistently and running his tongue up the heat of him. He’s had Hawk cum in his mouth before, or make a mess on his hips, but something about the exhausted desperation in the other man has him overtly eager to push him over the edge. 

A few expert presses of his tongue has Hawkeye bent in half and groaning, hips canting up into BJ’s mouth as a familiar rush of liquid hits his tongue. He comes in the shuddering, spent way that he does when something’s truly sapped his energy, like his muscles are forcing out every last drop of adrenaline left in his form. 

Hawk slumps, panting, looking down at BJ’s face. His lips are pink, shiny, spread in a grin that Hawkeye recognizes vaguely as self-satisfied. 

“Did you-“ Hawk asks, breathless, eyes already fighting to stay open.

BJ glances down and holds up his hand rakishly, from which a translucent white liquid drips viscously.

“I guess I really am that pretty.” Hawk laughs, flopping back onto his bunk. “God damn.”

BJ chuckles quietly, snagging a square of cloth from his trunk and wiping his palm off brusquely. Hawk jumps when the cloth touches his inner thigh, albeit much gentler than the way BJ had cleaned himself. 

He lets his compatriot wipe the slick from his inner thighs, thinking in abstract about his pants in a lump somewhere near Frank’s cot.

He doesn’t even find the breath to ask before BJ is tossing them across his waist. 

“Thanks.”

“Anytime, soldier.”

BJ falls into his own cot, turning off their lamp on the way. The stars are bright, and the moon is brighter, and Hawkeye can just barely make out the side of his face in the pale light. He stares at the hollow outline of the man’s eye socket, the way the shadows dip into the hollows of his cheekbones.

He looks more skeletal than Hawkeye ever wanted to see a man look.

“It’s gonna be okay, Hawk,” he murmurs, in that fucking _BJ_ way that almost makes Hawkeye believe it.

“Of course it’s going to be okay,” Hawkeye mumbles, turning onto his back to stare at the ceiling. He feels rather like a child caught staring in a department store window. 

“It’ll be okay on top of a hundred thousand bodies.”

  
  


“Better than a hundred thousand and one we could have saved.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! i hope you enjoyed this fic- it's my first for MASH. comments are appreciated!


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